1. Field
The device and process is in general directed to unique Internet access identification.
2. Related Art
Internet advertising has become a multibillion dollar industry allowing various advertisers to provide directed advertisements to websites and search engines at minimal cost. The cost of such advertisement is typically based on the number of clicks an advertisement receives from various World Wide Web (www) Internet Users. Accordingly, an Internet advertiser typically pays for the advertisements in a per use or “pay-per-click” manner. In other words, when an Internet user selects or “clicks” an Internet advertisement, the advertiser is charged.
The Internet advertiser can typically provide the advertisements in a number of different ways. In one way, the Internet advertising can be generated by a search engine when an Internet User makes a search based on a particular set of key words or the like. The Internet advertiser can typically provide their advertisements to the search engine webpage thus providing the Internet User with an advertisement based on the search criteria.
A second way in which an Internet advertiser may provide their advertisement to Internet Users is to associate or embed their advertisement into a typical third party or non-search engine based webpage. In both of these cases, when the Internet User clicks on the Internet advertisement provided by the Internet advertiser, the Internet advertiser is typically charged a certain fee for the click.
Unfortunately the Internet advertising industry has been subject to a number of different types of fraud. One type of fraud is created when a user or an automated robotic computer fraudulently clicks an Internet advertisement. This clicking is not based on any interest in the Internet advertiser's advertisement, however the Internet advertiser is still typically subject to the pay-per-click cost generated when this fraudulent click is made to their Internet advertisement. The fraudulent clicks can be generated from those various individuals that will benefit from the pay-per-click cost to the Internet advertiser. These individuals include those that host the Internet advertisement, competitors that benefit from the advertiser losing money on advertising, and the like. For example various competitors of the advertisers may wish to harm the competitor who is providing Internet advertising in the same market. The harm could come by clicking on their Internet advertisements to run up the advertising cost to the Internet advertiser. This will typically weaken or eliminate the source of competition for this particular individual. In any event, no matter what the source of the fraudulent click to the Internet advertiser, the Internet advertiser ends up paying the cost for Internet advertisement that is not provided to an interested Internet user.
Another type of Internet advertising fraud is impression fraud. Impression fraud is the repeated loading of and reloading of a search engine page or web page having an advertisement. When repeatedly loading the webpage advertisement and not clicking on the webpage advertisement, the advertisement will appear to be a non-performing webpage advertisement. Accordingly because the webpage is non-performing, the search engine or web master will have a tendency to drop it.
A number of search engines have tried to reduce the amount of fraudulent clicks by employing various technologies or fraud filters. For example, at least one search engine has created algorithms that sift through the clicks to find patterns suggesting fraud. Once fraud is determined, they disregard the fraudulent clicks without regard to the source or motive of the clicks. One such way in which to determine fraudulent clicks is to ascertain a time and IP address from the source of the click. For example, an Internet advertiser may host a webpage advertisement in another webpage. This webpage advertisement will typically have its own very long Universal Resource Locator (URL). This URL is typically embedded with a string of information that includes the current time (in milliseconds), the last time the host webpage was updated (also in milliseconds), and various other data to track an Internet User behavior. Thereafter, the search engine may review this information to ascertain whether or not a particular Internet User has clicked on the same advertisement more than once. If the same Internet User has clicked on the advertisement multiple times, then the advertisement will only be considered to have received a single click. Another approach is to look for telltale behavior including proxy servers and clicks coming from geographic areas not likely to have customers. However, this information is typically very difficult to obtain.
These various approaches to reducing fraudulent clicks have been less than satisfactory. In particular, fraudulent clicks still make up a large percentage of the clicks that are received by typical advertisers.
Further, an Internet User on the World Wide Web is typically given Internet advertising that is not relevant to their geography. This is because a typical Internet User browses the Web in a manner such that no one knows their geographic location. Accordingly, local advertisers are typically not interested in providing any type of local advertisement on the World Wide Web as they rightfully believe that the majority of individuals will not typically be relevant to their advertising as they are out of the geographic location that could benefit them through their advertising. There is no solution to geographic locating of Internet Users that is satisfactory for dealing with the above-noted issue.
Accordingly, there is a need to uniquely identify an Internet User in order to determine that they are indeed a legitimate consumer for Internet advertising, and there is a further need to determine the geographic location of an Internet User in order to better direct geographic specific advertising to the Internet User.